Browsing: Med Lit
Say you or somebody you love has a heart attack and you want to understand exactly what a heart attack is; where do you go for information? The ASUCLA Health Sciences Bookstore is a good place to start. Located on the first floor of UCLA’s main hospital, the store stocks about 9,000 titles on medicine, dentistry, public health nursing and psychiatry.
The second-largest medical bookstore in the U.S., the store has quick access to 30,000 titles and publishes a catalogue listing books that are available to the public free of charge. But be warned; most of these books are highly technical tomes far beyond the ken of most laymen.
“You have to be a medical professional to understand most of the books we carry,” says Jeff Marder, who’s managed the store for 11 years, “and 10% of our stock is comprised of textbooks for classes at UCLA’s schools of health sciences. The remainder of our stock is made up of reference materials for doctors and the professionals in the medical center here.
“Nonetheless, lots of non-professionals come into the store,” he continues. “People come in looking for books on specific medical problems--things like hypertension, weight control or depression--and we can usually direct them to something suitable to their level of knowledge. We also do a lot of business with the film industry. If they’re shooting something that’s set in a doctor’s office or hospital, they’ll come in and buy charts and skeletons from us, and special effects people come in and buy books with pictures of gunshot wounds and things like that.
“About 3,000 new medical books are published every year,” Marder continues, “and the areas of medicine currently receiving the most attention are AIDS and nutrition. Cardiology, neurology and sports medicine are always big, but interest in the subject of longevity seems to be falling off. Surprisingly, there aren’t as many books being written on psychopharmacology as you’d expect--I have no idea why that is. Holistic and Ayurvedic (Hindu) medicine, acupuncture, acupressure and chiropractic are still dismissed as fringe stuff by most of the mainstream medical community, and I see no sign of that changing. If there’s anything revolutionary on the horizon in the store it would be the advent of health science books on CD-ROM.
“Medical books aren’t packaged flamboyantly because it’s not a conventionally competitive market. People seem to trust more conservative-looking books more, so the covers rarely have pictures.
“There is competition in the field, though. There are two basic internal medicine texts that get updated every four or five years and cost about the same amount. The only way they have of getting an edge on each other is by having publisher’s reps visit instructors or doctors and push their book.
“Our most expensive book is the ‘CIBA Anatomy Series,’ a 13-volume book on anatomy that sells for $560. It’s a beautiful, heavily illustrated book that looks nice in an office and is often given as a graduation gift. So, we sell quite a few of those.”
The ASUCLA Health Sciences Bookstore is open Monday-Thursday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. For further information: (310) 825-7721.
